At the 2016 Venice Film Festival, the Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo conferred several awards on Catholic and religious films. The SIGNIS award went to Roan Johnson’s Piuma, which recounts the story of two high school kids, husband and wife, who discover they are expecting a child and decide to keep it. “The young director,” said the film jury, “offers an important message of hope and courage to families through his original, ironic and tender way of speaking about love and life.”
It came as no surprise when Piuma also received the Civitas Vitae Award, because, as jury head Federico Pontiggia attested, “Johnson recounts an ordinary but also extraordinary story of social cohesion.” In fact, the movie is not so much about how the two young protagonists cope with pregnancy and the choices involved, as how they deal with the adult world around them.
The Silver Lion Award, conferred in memory of Fr. Nazareno Taddei, sj, went to Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise, which recounts the relationship between a concentration camp inmate and an SS officer during the Holocaust. Film critic Gian Luigi Bozza, on behalf of the jury, said that the film “effectively recaptures a tragic period of contemporary European history and underscores the importance of Christian and human values, as well as that of human freedom.”
The Protestant-evangelical jury of Interfilm awarded its prize to White Sun by Nepalese Deepak Rauniyar, saying that the film is “a delicately-depicted, multi-generational story that guarantees interfaith access to a wide audience, offering them a message of hope.”